I Live in That Forest

I live in that forest that has its roots on the seventh floor of a glass door building. A forest having the roof of the sky where my dreams fly with the wings of thoughts. A forest that serves as a home to the broken pieces of my heart and the roaring lion of depression inside my soul. A forest, where the leaves don’t fall when the autumn comes, but when they really want to set themselves free from the branches. A forest that’s my universe, and a universe, that’s perhaps, my family.

A forest, where I never feel hungry. Because, I eat stories. When the monsters inside my stomach growl, I feed them with the shrubs, the tiny tales. And when those monsters attempt to eat my stomach itself, I serve them with the tall trees, the long stories. And just when they refuse to sleep, the fruits of poetry induce sleep.

A forest, where I never feel thirsty. Where a river of words flows from the glaciers of Rowling’s mind, or Tagore’s heart, and countless other glaciers, not everyone knows about. When my throat gets layered with dust of depression, and yearns for water to wash it away, I squeeze the grapes from the tallest trees, that carry the dust down my throat. Grapes are perhaps, the sour struggling stories that I read in biographies.

A forest, where I sleep on the trunks of gnarled trees, and hang onto the branches where a nightingale sings the words of Keats; where the rain of words from clouds of writers’ minds drench the heart trapped within my cage; and carelessly falling into marshes of the stories I thought I would never read, l get layered with the mud, whose smell doesn’t annoy me anymore.

A forest that fears to be destroyed by the woodcutters who threaten to chop the trunks of the trees. A forest where they want to plant the seeds of chemical reactions and mathematical formulas. A forest where they wish to transform the voracious reader into a stupid robot and teach him the art of mugging up.

However, they fail to realise that the animal feeding on leaves and fruits, can’t eat the trunks, the animal that quenches its thirst with water, can’t gulp in the bottles of chemicals that are toxic to his mind, and the lion who has learnt to roar can’t moo like the cattle.

And gradually, they burn down the forest, leaving a smile on my face. Because, I know, the soil will be more fertile than before, the new roots will be much more stronger, and the trees will be taller than the sky.

I sow the seeds once again, and watch my universe grow.

And, I breathe once again, in the forest that has its roots on the seventh floor of a glass door building. A forest having the roof of the sky where my new dreams fly with the wings of hope.